The Worker and the Southerner: The Invention of Laziness and the Representation of Southern Europe in the Age of the Industrious Revolutions

In Latin, the word industria, from which derives the English "industry," is a composite word that contains the preposition indu, equivalent to "in," and either the verb stare or the verb struere. In the first case, industria would come from in-stare, the act of holding one's ground, of persevering; in the second case, the word would refer to struere, thus referring to two possible meanings: the act of "constructing" or the act of "accumulating." These three possible interpretations of the Latin word, rather than being contradictory, reveal the connection that the word "industry" establishes between industriousness (as diligent work), production (as the material result of human labor), and accumulation (as the result of a surplus produced). What we call "industrial society" is, quite appropriately, the combination of these three elements in the form of a work ethos, a mode of production, and a form of accumulation. However, in the history of what we call industrialization, the relation between the first and the third element, industriousness and the accumulation of surplus, has been particularly intricate, for, in the process of constructing an industrial economy, industriousness and surplus were seen as potentially mutually exclusive. This article explores the role that the representation of southern Europe as a land of surplus and laziness played, since the early stages of the industrialization of northern Europe, in providing both a moral compensation and a quasi-racial threat to the workers of northern Europe who were pressured to abandon older attitudes toward work and embraced a new relation between industriousness and surplus.

Given the role that industrialization has played in shaping our understanding of modernity, there is a long history of reflection on the relation between industriousness, industrialism, and surplus. Marx, in the Grundrisse, pointed out that such a relation could be used to determine the wealth of a society because the development of machines, qua fixed capital, provides neither "individual gratification" nor "direct exchange value" and, consequently, a certain amount of wealth and labor has to be available above the requirements for the reproduction of bare life. Thus, according to Marx, the investment in the construction of machines requires that a society be "able to wait," and such an ability to postpone gratification requires "a certain level of productivity and of relative overabundance." "Surplus population (from this standpoint), as well as surplus production," Marx concluded, "is a condition for this" (Marx, 707).

As is apparent in this fragment, Marx's explanation of the reasons for the postponement of "individual gratification" is not entirely satisfactory. He clearly defined the conditions for the possibility of such deferment, but he did not attempt to discuss how the discipline required to suppress the urge to immediately enjoy the surplus was created or enforced. Whereas it is easy to agree with Marx that the availability of surplus is a precondition for the investment of that surplus in machines, which do not provide immediate gratification, Marx himself does not seem to discuss the impulse behind such postponement. In other words, Marx does not discuss what impulse is behind the industriousness of capitalist society, its decision to "postpone in dividual gratification" and continue to work for the purpose of accumulation.

Famously, this omission constituted the basis for Max Weber's critique of Marxism in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and provided the central question of the book. As Weber put it, "the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture" (Weber, 53). Thus, from the point of view of the single individual and his or her happiness, the postponement of the enjoyment of surplus is, according to Weber, "entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational" (53). This anti-hedonistic way of life is characteristic, according to Weber, not only of the capitalists, but also of the laborers themselves, so much so that, Weber wrote, "a conscious acceptance of these ethical maxims on the part of the individuals, entrepreneurs or...